All’s Fair: The Story of the British Secret Service

By Cpt. Henry Landau

It was in 1934 that Henry Landau, Captain in the British Army’s RFA, first published his memoirs as a World War I spy master.

All’s Fair: The Story of the British Secret Service tells an authentic, exciting, true story of spies and their dangerous work, revealed for the first time by a British Secret Service Agent…

“It does not contain a dull page.”—New York Herald Tribune

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eschenburg Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787209312

Cpt. Henry Landau

Henry Landau OBE (7 March 1892 - 20 May 1968) as a South African World War I volunteer who served with the British Army’s Royal Field Artillery when he was recruited into what is now known as the SIS (MI6). He was notable for handling one of the most effective espionage networks of the First World War, La Dame Blanche, and later wrote a number of bestselling novels about his experiences during the war. Landau was born to an Afrikaner mother and English father who fought on the Boer side in the Boer War. He studied at Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with first-class honours in Natural Sciences before the outbreak of WWI. In August 1914 he went to France with a volunteer hospital unit, later gaining a commission with the Royal Field Artillery. He was then recruited and sent to the MI6 station in Rotterdam, from where all the British spy networks in Belgium, France and Germany were handled under command of Richard B. Tinsley. Landau became head of military intelligence at the Rotterdam branch, and his main task was to connect with Belgian resistance groups. His biggest success would be the handling of La Dame Blanche, a group of more than a thousand Belgian and French agents who monitored the movement of German troop trains to and from the Western Front. After the war Landau was sent to lead the passport control office in Berlin. He resigned the military in 1920 and took employment procuring patents and inventions for a British shipbuilding company. He later returned to South Africa, before emigrating to the United States in 1923 where he worked as a teacher. After obtaining U.S. citizenship in 1933, Landau worked as an investigator for the Federal Works Agency and the U.S. Maritime Commission. He died in Chilapa, Mexico in 1968, aged 76.

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Text originally published in 1934 under the same title.

© Eschenburg Press 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

ALL’S FAIR:

THE STORY OF THE BRITISH SECRET SERVICE

BEHIND THE GERMAN LINES

BY

CAPTAIN HENRY LANDAU

O.B.E., CROIX DE GUERRE,

CHEVALIER ORDER OF THE CROWN OF BELGIUM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

PREFACE 4

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 5

I 6

CHAPTER I—FROM BOER TO EUROPEAN 6

CHAPTER II—I BECOME AN ENGLISHMAN 9

CHAPTER III—MINING AND ROMANTIC DIPLOMACY 12

CHAPTER IV—GETTING TO THE FIRING LINE 14

II 19

CHAPTER V—I ENTER THE BRITISH SECRET SERVICE 19

CHAPTER VI—THE PROBLEMS OF THE WARTIME SECRET SERVICE 23

CHAPTER VII—VAN BERGEN MOUNTS MY FIRST ORGANIZATION 30

CHAPTER VIII—TRAIN-WATCHERS AND PROMENEURS 35

CHAPTER IX—A SENATOR TURNS SPY 39

CHAPTER X—RELAYING THE NEWS: PASSEURS, LETTER BOXES, AND FALSE PAPERS 42

CHAPTER XI—MARIE, SUCCESSFUL SPY AT FOURTEEN 48

CHAPTER XII—DESERTERS BRING THE BIGGEST SCOOP OF THE WAR 51

CHAPTER XIII—AN AGENT-PROVOCATEUR CHECK-MATED 56

CHAPTER XIV—THE WHITE LADY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS 60

CHAPTER XV—A RUSSIAN INTERLUDE 68

CHAPTER XVI—INTERNATIONAL WARFARE AMONG THE SERVICES IN HOLLAND 71

CHAPTER XVII—ROUTINE EXCITEMENTS AT THE OFFICE 77

CHAPTER XVIII—THE DANE: GREATEST OF THE ALLIED WARTIME SPIES 81

CHAPTER XIX—SURPRISES OF THE COAST PATROL: THE WIRELESS TORPEDO-BOAT 85

CHAPTER XX—ESPIONAGE, COUNTER-ESPIONAGE, AND SPY-HYSTERIA 89

CHAPTER XXI—A SPY DROPPED BY AEROPLANE INTO ENEMY TERRITORY 95

CHAPTER XXII—AN ASTOUNDING PROPOSITION FROM THE HAMBURG SOLDIERS’ COUNCIL 99

CHAPTER XXIII—THE KAISER IS INTERNED, AND OWES HIS LIFE TO HIS COOK 102

CHAPTER XXIV—I WATCH THE RETREAT OF THE GERMAN ARMY 105

CHAPTER XXV—PREPARING TO LIQUIDATE THE SERVICE AND WRITE ITS MEMOIRS 108

CHAPTER XXVI—LIQUIDATION IN POST-WAR BRUSSELS 113

CHAPTER XXVII—THE HISTORY OF EDITH CAVELL 117

CHAPTER XXVIII—FROM PULLING STRINGS TO AWARDING RIBBONS 122

CHAPTER XXIX—FAREWELL TO THE WAR-TIME SERVICE 125

III 129

CHAPTER XXX—PASSPORT CONTROL IN STARVED GERMANY 129

CHAPTER XXXI—YVONNE AND THE PLAYGROUNDS OF EUROPE 134

CHAPTER XXXII—FINANCIAL ADVENTURES IN BELGIUM AND FRANCE 140

CHAPTER XXXIII—PEACE-TIME SECRET SERVICE 143

CHAPTER XXXIV—TRACING DOWN WAR WIZARDRY 147

CHAPTER XXXV—INFLATION DAYS IN CENTRAL EUROPE 152

CHAPTER XXXVI—INDUSTRIALISTS AND INDUSTRIAL SPIES 157

CHAPTER XXXVII—THE GERMAN SECRET SERVICE MAKES A PROPOSAL 164

CHAPTER XXXVIII—THE RUSSIANS OF BERLIN OPEN A NEW FIELD AND A MAD ADVENTURE 167

CHAPTER XXXIX—SUCCESSFUL FAILURE IN SOVIET RUSSIA 172

CHAPTER XL—THE SPY DIRECTOR IS SPIED UPON: THE JEWELS OF LENINGRAD 177

CHAPTER XLI—ADIEU, YVONNE! 181

CHAPTER XLII—SOUTH AFRICA CALLS 183

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 184

PREFACE

ONE of my chief objects in writing this book is to place on record the splendid services which the Secret Service agents of Belgian and French nationality rendered the Allied cause during the War. It is time that the world should be informed about these brave men and women, hundreds of whom heroically gave up their lives or suffered imprisonment for their country.

By far the greater majority of those who were employed by the British Secret Service in the occupied territories of Belgium and France, and in Germany, worked directly under me as their immediate Chief in the Field, and I was the only one who knew, not only every thread which connected them with me, but also the exact value of the information which each agent sent out.

I have not attempted to conceal the identity of diplomatic representatives and public officials, and of some of the agents employed in neutral countries. As regards the agents in territory occupied by the enemy, I have only mentioned such names as were known to the Germans through the arrests they made; others I have either changed, or not mentioned at all. This I have done in order to protect former agents in the event of another invasion of Belgium and France during their lifetime.

I am the best judge of what information would compromise them. I protected their lives during the War; I am, therefore, competent now to know what can be divulged. In short, nothing has been mentioned in this book which can do any one harm; and yet it gives the public for the first time a complete picture of the sort of information secured, and exactly how it was obtained.

I believe that all I have set down concerning espionage appears in print for the first time. Some of the events took place nearly twenty years ago, so that an occasional omission is excusable; but the little I may have forgotten is more than made up for by what I have gained in perspective.

If I have often left out the names of friends and of those with whom I had business relations after the War, it has not been because of lack of appreciation, but merely because I have not wished to compromise them, or the great companies to which they belonged, in a book which deals chiefly with Secret Service, or with activities which might have been interpreted as commercial espionage.

H. L.

May 10, 1934.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Map showing the British Secret Service’s principal lines of communication across the Belgian-Dutch frontier

A weekly Summary of Intelligence issued by G.H.Q.

Silhouettes showing composition of trains conveying constituted units

Railway map showing the Dame Blanche train-watching posts

Facsimiles of code slip and dictionary page

Silhouettes of German dreadnoughts and battle cruisers

I

CHAPTER I—FROM BOER TO EUROPEAN

I WAS born to be what by chance I became; no child could have been ushered into the world under better conditions or in a more fertile environment for the dangerous and varied service into which I was thrown at the time of the Great War. By blood, by breeding and education, by the very country and atmosphere into which I was born, and the circumstances through which I grew to manhood, I was a composite of many inheritances and many backgrounds.

I was born of a Dutch mother and an English father, in Boer South Africa. My earliest memories center about the arduous, almost medieval life of the veldt, and my first vivid impressions were those of war. Hazily I can remember the long trek in ox wagons from the Orange Free State to our farm in the Transvaal, when I was between four and five years of age; the long spans of red Afrikander oxen, the kaffirs with their long ox whips, the campfires, the hunters returning with their day’s bag of springbuck and koorhaan remain in my mind pictures at once remote and vivid.

I have visions, too, of my mother superintending the making of household essentials, which the Boer women of those days had to attend to—remedies for simple illness, soap, candles, and dried beef or biltong. She was an excellent horsewoman and a fine shot, and, in addition to her many household duties, it came naturally to her to handle the kaffirs and the stock in my father’s absence. I can see her, at the approach of one of those South African thunderstorms which always seemed to come suddenly from nowhere, calling to the kaffirs to bring in the calves and other small stock, and herself scurrying off to direct them. Married at sixteen, she probably knew more about farming and stock raising than my father, for she came of a long line of French Huguenots and Dutch, who had lived on the land in South Africa for close on two hundred years, ever trekking northward to escape British rule, and in search of freedom. There was something elemental in her make-up, a ruggedness of character which breathed of the veldt itself. Her main qualities were dependability and resourcefulness; she was the master of every situation which arose, largely because of her own experiences and a fund of general knowledge carefully handed down by her pioneer mother.

From seven to ten, I lived in the midst of the fighting of the Boer War, and though I had relatives fighting on both sides, my boyish sympathies were all with the Boers. The coming and going of small groups of horsemen with their tales of heroic encounters with the British, their ambushes and skirmishes, their marvelous skill with the rifle, their hairbreadth escapes, their hiding places, their foraging for food, all filled me with the glamour of war, which later on as a young man, on the British declaration of war, sent me trudging to Whitehall in a frenzied endeavor to get into the great adventure before it was too late.

My English father, a burgher on account of his long residence in Boer territory, was forced to join the Boer forces, and was placed by General Joubert at the head of the Commissariat in the Standerton District; but during the latter part of the Boer War, guerilla warfare removed all need of a fixed commissariat, and so my father’s application for leave of absence was readily granted. Through the back door of Portuguese East Africa and Delagoa Bay, he was able to get to Europe to attend to the disposal of a large consignment of wool, which he had shipped at the outbreak of war, and which was being held up in Portugal. Finding himself unmolested on a visit to England, he was bold enough to try to return to the Transvaal via the British base at the Cape. All went well until, on the second day after his arrival in Cape Town, he ran into a group of Boer prisoners from his home district, who were being marched under guard through the streets. Their yells of greeting led to his prompt arrest and internment.

My mother and the children were now stranded in the Transvaal, and, as our studies had been sadly disrupted during the war, my father decided to send us all to Europe to complete our education. Passes were eventually obtained permitting us to leave the country. My father was also liberated, as the war was now in its last stages. Mafeking and Ladysmith had been relieved; Lord Roberts had occupied Pretoria; most of the Boer leaders had surrendered; it was merely a question of rounding up De Wet and the few followers that still remained with him.

I was destined by this removal to lose my home for good; it is true I was to travel with my mother for some time, but I never knew a real home again. The chief impressions it had made upon me, however, strongly survived, because of the dominating character of my father, who had so largely filled my early horizons. A born raconteur, he had filled my boyhood fancies with pioneer tales of the past. In 1874, after a six months’ voyage out from London in a sailing ship, he had landed at the Cape to find that his older brother, whom he was to join, had returned to England. Thrown entirely on his own, he had lived in succession the life of a transport driver, farmer, trader and merchant. He had trekked with the Boers from the Cape, to take up new lands in the Transvaal and Orange Free State; he had participated in Kaffir wars; he had been connected with the diamond mines in Kimberley; he had ridden over the Witwatersrand and the site of the city of Johannesburg before the discovery of gold, and when there was hardly a farmhouse in sight. He had wonderful tales of the illicit diamond buyers, cattle thieves, and the thousands of wildebeest, springbuck, blesbok, and other game, which swarmed the veldt in those days. No wonder I grew up into restless manhood, ever ready to follow every impulse and opportunity which led to adventure and travel.

My first sight of the sea, and the three weeks’ voyage from Durban to Southampton was a thrill. When I arrived I found the gray treeless veldt, the kopjes, and the wide expanses of the Transvaal exchanged for the green fields, hedges, and lawns of England. Gone were the ox wagon and the unclad kaffir. I was deposited in London, to experience at the impressionable age of nine the delirium of a nation at the signing of peace, the coronation of Edward VII with all its pageantry, and the metamorphosis of my own self from Afrikander to European, by means of school days and vacations on the continent.

My recollection of my first school—Dulwich College—is vague. Memory brings to the surface odd events and impressions of no importance now, but which were probably of great interest to me then: my first Eton suit and bowler hat; P. G. Wodehouse, a prefect at Treddie’s house; the Bedford and Haileybury football matches; Dr. Gilkes, the head master, stern and forbidding; and the Latin school song, which impressed me greatly.

Christmas found me in Dresden with my mother and sisters, and later on I was placed in a German school instead of returning to England. Dutch, which of course I spoke as fluently as English, helped me with German, and within six months I was speaking the language like a native. I have pleasant memories of Dresden, young as I was; I liked the Saxon people. The parents of my school companions were immensely interested in this boy from South Africa. I am afraid, urged on by repeated questioning, I sometimes gave them exaggerated descriptions of life on the veldt. Rucksack on back, I spent weekends and vacations with my German companions and some of their parents on short walking tours in Saxon Switzerland. I recall the glorious scenery of the Basteibrücke, Schandau, Pillnitz, and other resorts, and the delightful wayside inns where we slept at night. With the inquisitive eyes of youth, I was absorbing all I saw of German life and customs; partly from my affection for the country, and partly from the fresh vividness of my boyish impressions, I was effortlessly creating a foundation of assured familiarity with Germany which proved of value later on.

CHAPTER II—I BECOME AN ENGLISHMAN

I HAD now reached an important turning point in my life; the rest of my boyhood and young manhood was to be spent in boarding school and universities. My parents I saw less and less often, for my mother, on her return from Europe, was to obtain a divorce from my father. True to her Boer traditions, she returned to the land to conduct her own stock farm, while my father threw himself with enthusiasm into the multiple developments which were now taking place in South Africa under British rule. At the end of the year in Europe, it was decided that I should return to South Africa, where my father placed me immediately in the Durban High School. I remained there until my sixteenth year.

It was a splendid school, fulfilling the best traditions of the finest of the English public schools, and its faculty was composed of Oxford and Cambridge men. Here I was changed into an Englishman; I was taught to play the game; I excelled in athletics, and I was turned out a scholar. At prize giving, I was patted on the back by Sir Matthew Nathan, the governor of Natal, in whose brother’s rooms at the Albany in London later on, I was often to sit answering rapid fire questions on the political situation in Belgium and Germany.

Natal, with Durban, its chief port and city, was at this time a British Crown Colony, almost more English than England herself. It prided itself in being free of Boer settlers, and it was not until some years later, when it was forced into the Union of South Africa, that Dutch was taught in its schools. French was the modern language used instead, and here, in the Durban High School, over a period of five years, I gained that thorough knowledge of syntax and grammar, which later, aided by long stays in France and Belgium, and by close contact with their people, made me master of the French language.

Most of my vacations were spent on some farm or other, where my chief occupation was riding and shooting. What other country can boast of three kinds of partridges, quail, bustard, spur-wing goose, pau, muscovy duck (as big as turkeys—they had to be shot with a rifle), snipe, and three or four different species of smaller antelope, all within easy reach of an ordinary farm? It was enough to keep any healthy boy in the saddle from morning to night; I virtually lived on horseback.

At sixteen, I was ready for entrance to a University, but my father judged me too young to proceed over-seas. Accordingly, I was entered as a student in the Government Agricultural College, at Potchefstroom, in the Transvaal. Here I was in my element. I loved farming; it was in my blood. No course could have been more interesting to anyone who had been raised on the land. For an institution of its kind, we probably had the finest equipment and the most valuable stock in the world, for it was to serve not only as an agricultural college, but as a farm from which thoroughbred cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, poultry, and seeds were to be supplied to the whole of South Africa. I liked everything about the College, and even though I was in competition with boys and men much older than myself, many of them University graduates, my enthusiasm and application enable me to pass out top of the whole college at the end of the first year.

At this juncture, the South African Government decided to award about a dozen scholarships of 400 pounds a year, for four years, to students for the purpose of study in American and English agricultural colleges. In the light of my success at Potchefstroom, one of these scholarships was mine for the asking, but my father, feeling that he could afford to pay the cost, decided to send me to Cambridge University at his own expense. It was a decision which changed my whole career. Wrongly or rightly, I believed these twelve Government students would be given preference over me on their return to South Africa, and so, upon proceeding to Cambridge, I abandoned agriculture for a mining career.

Why I changed from agriculture to mining, instead of to some other profession, I do not know. I was probably influenced by my father’s older brother, who had made and lost several fortunes in mining: he was one of the first to develop the mines on the Rand, and at one time had owned Auckland Park, the finest residential section of Johannesburg. Later the Witbank Collieries were named after him; he eventually died in Spain developing a cinnabar mine. Or, perhaps, it was that other mining uncle of mine who was on a continual treasure hunt, searching for a fabulous sum in gold bars, which the Boers had instructed him and four other men to bury, one night, on the eve of the British entry into Johannesburg. When they were able to reach the spot in safety, two years later, they were unable to locate the exact site; if he is alive, he is probably still digging. No doubt, it was the love of adventure which played the leading part in my decision.

My three years in Cambridge were the happiest days of my life. The friends I formed there are the only ones I have kept close to my heart. Some were killed in the war; some at odd intervals I still hear from. The will to succeed was driving me on, and scholastically I was a brilliant success: at the end of my first year at Caius College I was elected an Exhibitioner; in my final examinations, in 1913, taking four sciences instead of the usual three, I passed the Natural Sciences Tripos with first class honors. I mention this point, not in a spirit of braggadocio, but because my precocity played an important part later on in my wartime advancement at a very early age to a position of great importance.

To Cambridge I owe a debt which I shall never be able to repay. Its traditions, its customs, its old colleges with their priceless architecture, their quadrangles, libraries, lawns and backs, and, above all, the companionship and the association with the products of England’s finest public schools, all left their imprint on me; they contributed to the molding of my character, and inspired in me a love of learning and an appreciation of the finer arts. It is the genius of the English schools that they turn out persons who are above all equable and affable, but controlled, reserved, and self-contained—the type that can get along with anyone anywhere without losing its own dignity and self-sufficiency. If I lack anything of these attributes the fault is mine; I was certainly shown the way.

At Cambridge, almost half the year is taken up with vacations, and all of them I spent traveling on the Continent. My bicycle accompanied me always through Germany, Holland, Belgium, and France, and as I spoke the three languages of these four countries fluently, I was continually on the move. I covered hundreds of miles. I rode the pavé from Brussels to Ghent; I climbed the hills in the Ardennes. Walking tours carried me through the Black Forest and the Hartz; I explored the Rhineland from Heidelberg to Düsseldorf, sometimes pedaling my wheel, sometimes gliding lazily on river steamers. It was the people that interested me above all: their customs, their way of living, their philosophy of life. I was Bohemian in my tastes: sometimes I frequented the homes, cafés and places of entertainment in the poorer sections; but other times, in the great cities such as Berlin, I afforded myself the luxury of the big international hotels, the Adlon and the Bristol, and restaurants such as those of Hiller, Borchart, and Horcher.

To see a country, to study its language and the ways of its people, to look under the façade which is dressed up for the tourist, and finally to learn its topography, there is no better way than a walking or bicycle tour. The energy expended is well repaid in rich dividends of experience and information gained. If I never visit Holland again, I shall ever remember that the road from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, via The Hague and Haarlem, is as flat as a pancake, and that, on the contrary, there are appreciable hills around Arnhem. Even if memory failed, the muscles of the legs would jog it.

Here, then, for almost four years, six months in the year, I was learning the feel of Europe—absorbing a knowledge of the actual land and furthering a familiarity with its intimate life. It was a continuation of the days at Dresden, but with the field vastly greater, and the enjoyment enhanced by mature observation and judgment. All unwittingly, I was preparing myself for the rôle which I was to play during the War.

CHAPTER III—MINING AND ROMANTIC DIPLOMACY

JUNE, 1913, saw me graduated from Cambridge with still two years to be spent at a mining school, if I wanted to qualify myself thoroughly as a mining engineer. To this end, three mining schools presented themselves: the one in London, Freiburg in Germany, and the Colorado School of Mines.

Ever ready for an excuse to travel, I decided on a personal tour of inspection, beginning with the college most remote. In July I sailed for Quebec as a steerage passenger in the company of two other Cambridge men. After a day’s experience, two of us decided to transfer to regular accommodations, however expensive it might prove. We were willing to suffer hardships, but we were afraid of disease: cleanliness was not an inherent characteristic of the steerage passengers from Galicia and Southern Russia. Our chief occupation during the rest of the voyage was sneaking food out of the First Class Saloon to pass on to our companion left in the steerage.

I was duly impressed by the usual round of sights offered to the tourist in the United States, but my one urge was to get out West. In Denver, I ran short of money. I was thoroughly unprepared for the difference in the cost of living in Europe and the United States, and I dared not apply to my father, who had not been consulted about my American trip. On impulse, I decided to work out the six weeks on a cattle ranch, and managed to be hired by the Carey Brothers, whose place is one of the biggest in the United States. I spent a happy six weeks oblivious of mining and studies, earning two dollars a day, plus the best of food and lodging. The work, pitching hay, or tramping it down on the top of a haystack, was hard, but I was young and healthy, and the work did me a world of good. I thoroughly enjoyed the company of the cowboys, listening to their tales of early times in the West, and putting up with the many tricks they played on me; they broke me into the intricacies of the Western saddle, and on privileged occasions I was allowed to ride the ranges.

Toward the end of September, I went to Golden, ready to give the Colorado School of Mines a trial. The London School of Mines opened on October 15th, so I knew I could still reach London in time for the opening if I wished. To a graduate accustomed to Cambridge with its serene reserve, its lecture and tutorial system, its traditions, its culture, its beautiful old colleges with their lawns and walks, the Colorado School of Mines was a direct contrast. Set amongst mines, where students could get practical experience, it was then, and probably is today, the finest mining school in the world; but my sole memory of it is the general instruction of the classroom system, which was too much for me, and the hazing of the freshmen, which as a post-graduate I was permitted to escape, but which as a privileged spectator I was allowed to witness. I wonder if the freshmen are still forced to roll eggs with their tongues across the stage of the local movie theater, or whether paddling, raw egg shampoos, and coats of green paint are still the order of the day?

If I had stayed in Colorado, the following years might have been very different for me; but on an impulse which was perhaps homesickness and perhaps fate, I returned to England, and entered the London School of Mines as a post-graduate.

During this year, I worked incessantly, and the records of the School of Mines will show that I repeated my Cambridge successes by heading the lists in most of my classes. But though work was my chief interest and almost my whole occupation, the most memorable event of the time was my first innocent flyer in diplomacy—the diplomacy of romance. Once again, it was chance that played the leading rôle.

One evening, dropping into the Empire in Leicester Square, I saw a young and beautiful girl among the demimondaines of the theater’s notorious promenade; she